


The Blue Orbs of the Worlds

by sugarybowl



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Lisa is older than Len, This got darker before it got lighter, brief suggestion of child molestation, it's blink and you miss it but if you don't miss it it's horrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 14:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11602455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarybowl/pseuds/sugarybowl
Summary: Someone prompted me: Alternate universe Len where his and Lisa's ages are swapped or just where he's the younger sibling. And it was supposed to be about Len...but then I started writing. This is a universe where Lisa Snart is the one to look after and raise her little brother.





	The Blue Orbs of the Worlds

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE NOTE LISA'S CHILDHOOD WAS DARKER WITHOUT SOMEONE TO PROTECT HER, READ TAGS AND PLEASE BE CAREFUL.

Lisa Snart looks more like her mother every day and that costs her. Most days it’s just a slap to her face because if she’s going to paint herself up anyway Lewis will give her something to cover up. Other days are worse, because she looks too much like her and sometimes his eyes don’t see her and his hands aren’t fists and that’s worse. It’s only going to get worse, so she needs to run and she needs to hide. But she could never leave Lenny behind, with his big blue eyes and his quiet giggles - quiet because loud noises bring the scary shouts. She’s just turned 15 and she’s from just the right side of town for no one to blink twice when she ventures out into the streets of Central with a baby in her arms. 

It would have happened anyway, eventually, she tells herself. That’s what Lewis always says - little whores like her always get knocked up and run away. So what if she’s never kissed a boy, too afraid that all men’s palms will curl into fists if you say the wrong words. She’s still old enough and she still loves him enough to be strong for Lenny. But the shelters are full of questions and demands and well meaning case workers that want to give Lenny away and she knows, tiny and beautiful as he is - a good family would take him right away. But this little baby with his big blue eyes is all she has in the world. 

She takes the things her father taught her, the way to tell men what they want to hear and distract them with what you wear and touch them where they don’t feel their wallets slipping away. She slits in and out of houses through windows and fences and never takes anything shiny or golden even though she craves it, because these things call attention and sometimes she doesn’t think she deserves them. 

She keeps a low profile, pretty faces on pretty girls can be so simple to forget. She makes sure Lenny always has everything he needs, that he has enough rest and that he goes to school often enough to pass every grade. When he gets to middle school and the subjects are things she never learned enough to forget, she doesn’t shy away from finding the best help her smiles can persuade. 

Cisco Ramon is a Senior at CCU and Lisa thinks wistfully of a life where she’d be a professor there and all her friends would find her crush scandalous. But Lisa barely got to sophomore year of high school and every girl who was ever her friend was too busy trying to figure out how she hid a pregnancy so well to talk to her ever again.Cisco Ramon has his name written on the spines of all his binders which he spreads out over a booth table at the diner she’s waiting tables at every single day. She really has no idea what he’s doing, but some of the notes have BIOCHEM written across the top of them, so she figures the guy can help Len where she can’t. 

It’s not that Cisco isn’t affected by her smile like all the other boys, it’s that he looks at her, he really looks at her when he smiles back. It shakes her up and makes things go warm and fuzzy inside and so it takes her longer to ask. She watches Len’s “bored and judging you” routine fall apart at Cisco’s mention of Star Wars and for a moment doesn’t wonder what her life could have been if only this or only that - in that moment she is happy just like this.

“Your brother’s a genius,” he tells her one morning, his long hair falling into his face, “He’s not pretending to be bored - he’s genuinely well beyond grade-level. Why hasn’t he been accelerated yet?”

Lisa sighs and when she smiles she doesn’t even have to pretend, not with him. 

“Cisco honey... people like Lenny and me... ”

“Are awesome? Should have people fawning over you and those perfect waffles you make?”

Lisa truly and honestly laughs at that, “We’re trash, baby.”

He sputters and frowns and looks truly incensed about that.

“Wha...who would - who the hell told you that?”

“Well seeing as how I’m 28 and he’s 14 and no one bothers to ask if I actually gave birth to him, they tend to just go from there.”

“But even if you had what’s that got to do with the fact that your brother just corrected MY formulas and you raised him that way?”

“It’s just the way of the world Cisco,” she says with a regretful grin, “let me get you some pancakes.”

It takes a few days of Cisco and Len muttering under their breath over their notebooks before Cisco comes to her with his hair tied back and a blazer over his Ask Me About My Pi shirt just around the time she’s clocking out of work.

“I want to ask you something,” he says and Lisa feels her heart climb up to her throat. It’s not like she doesn’t get asked out every other day - but usually it’s something along the lines of a leer and a  _‘let’ me take you out, babe_ ’. Cisco’s hair is gelled.

“I know I look like an idiot, but I wanted to look serious when I asked - because I know it’s really serious. Well not serious. It’s...important.”

“Deep breaths, honey. What is it?” She asks, though she can hardly hold back her grin.

“Would you...allow your brother to intern at STAR Labs with me?”

Lisa has never felt such conflicted emotions of joy and disappointment like this. Her heart falls, not like an elevator with its ropes are cut but more like old newspaper tossed in the trash. At the same time she’s filled with fondness and warmth for the beautiful incredible man in front of her.

“I… of course! But… wait…you’re not like giving him your spot or anything right?”

“No no, um – well I was just like doing my last interview and they said how excited they were to have young blood in the program and I was all well you wanna talk about young blood of pure freaking genius well let me tell you about Lenny Snart except never call him Lenny cause he’ll sock you in the face for it but anyway – so I told them about him and showed them his work with me and they are like a hat drop away from taking him but they need his legal guardian to say yes.”

“Well yes! Yes of course, yes!” 

They laugh and then they laugh harder and Lisa doesn’t hold back from hugging him because, well, Cisco is her friend. And if she wants more than that, if she day dreams about dates and day trips and of having something for herself, well. She tucks that away. She takes her GREs quietly, because the two most important people in her world are geniuses and she likes to be able to fend for herself. In between Lenny’s hockey games and her work days, she plucks away at online universities. 

If she and Cisco hang out after work and school every day it's only that, best friends giving each other all of their days.

Lenny and Cisco thrive at STAR Labs and Cisco forms a ruckus at Central High until Lenny is promoted to the second semester of 12th grade. When he graduates just a few months later, Dr. Wells offers to pay for any university himself – but Lenny doesn’t want to leave Central. Not for MIT or Harvard, not for anything. All he wants is to go to CCU and get a job that will mean his sister doesn’t have to wipe another table clean ever again. Dr. Wells pays his tuition and offers him a paid internship while he’s at it, so that Len and Lisa can move to a better apartment and she can sit at the booth of their favorite diner instead of serving at it. Which means, of course, that Len and Cisco have a harder time conspiring. So it takes a full two months before Cisco stands in front of her again, hair gelled and blazer ironed once again.

“Let me guess,” she says with a smile, “you want Lenny to go with you to space.”

“As amazing as taking your genius but snarky brother to space with me would be,” he says, “I was…I was actually wondering if you’d ummm... wanna have dinner with me.”

“Cisco we have dinner together every day,” she says.

“I mean um… dinner that like we don’t make. Dinner like… at a nice place. Like ummm like a date.”

Her heart, which warm and full as it hadn’t been had no time to float or sink anywhere, doesn’t know what to do with itself. This time she doesn’t need to say yes, she just leans in and kisses him and ignores the whooping sounds of a 15 year old maniac somewhere to her left. 

And one day, when strangers come from another world and ask Len to go with them through time and space – he runs into her office screaming that the CEO of Ramon Industries is never to busy for her baby brother. Lisa raises her eyebrows at the webcam that connects her to her husband and can’t help but agree. 

Once Lisa thought those big blue eyes were the only thing she had in the world. It was years later that she came to realize hers had been the same to Len. Now he strides shining with pride and brilliance, to offer her the universe. 


End file.
